Going Local

The drive to Waldorf School seems like the kind of drive you’ll regret in retrospect. That is while you’re looking back at your life after having your arm torn off by some kind of Big Foot prone to calling the sprawling Avis brush on either side of a winding road his hillbilly home.

My sister Monica and I have no idea where we are. We’ve left home to pursue the promise of an ice cream tasting at a school that sounds like it was founded by that brunette from ‘Gossip Girl’ but as we make our way into deepest Avis, we realise we don’t even like ice cream.

Ice cream with its calories, its brain freezes and its ability to get one murdered out in Lord knows where while making your way towards it with a little brother and nephew in terrified tow.

“Where are we, Marth?” my little brother whines while staring at me like I was never any good and he can’t wait to tell my mum all about it. It’s a good question. A pertinent one even. But I shush him with more confidence than I feel because talking while terrified is a bad time.

To be clear, Waldorf School is far. Not catch-a-cab-to-Grove-Mall-and-encounter-assorted-signs-of-life far but scream-into-the-bush-and-hear-your-voice-echoing-back-at-you-for-centuries far.

We take a Dial-a-Cab.

It’s a Sunday afternoon, Windhoek looks like a dystopian novel about the last five people on Earth and so we choose life by summoning a cab to take us out into the bundus where we finally happen upon a cluster of buildings behind a gate, behind a boy who tells us all our trouble will cost us N$20 each.

If you’ve never been to Waldorf, the first thing you’ll want to know is that they have chickens.

Not being fattened for the slaughter.

Just playing around in a kraal with a couple of ducks gliding over a pond because that’s just the kind of school that Waldorf is.

A place that “emphasises the role of imagination in learning, striving to integrate holistically the intellectual, practical, and artistic development of pupils”. This according to Wikipedia who defines the educational philosophy developed of Rudolf Steiner as if it may or may not be a prelude to Hogwarts.

As for me? I define Waldorf as a place where there are chickens nobody will be eating and a whole lot of white people smile at you as if you’ve won some kind of prize. For being alive.

Outskirt education aside, the truth is everyone is disturbingly lovely.

Especially Edith Kalka of the Namibian Organic Association who catches me inhaling my second cup of Cramer ice cream and thinks my time will be better spent talking about strawberries.

Strawberries that were locally grown, recently sold out at the local Green Market and which have her beaming with pride as she tells me about all the local farms ditching pesticides and poisons to get organic certified.

By the end of it all, I have a hessian bag filled with documents calling on the government to protect the nation against GMOS, some notes about how to spot organic food at 20 paces and I also have the Namibian Organic Association’s newspaper ‘Living in Organic Times’. A publication boasting articles titled ‘But is it organic? Snow White asked the wicked old witch’, ‘GMO Baby Food Shock’ and ‘Wild Harvesting – Devil’s Claw’.

I find it fascinating.

My sister Monica looks recently returned from lobotomy.

And once Edith has returned to the land of ducks and all-you-can-eat ice cream, I decide to commit to laying my life down against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs).

OK, I don’t.

But after hearing about all the local farms producing fresh fruit and vegetables, I do decide to commit to a month of eating nothing but locally-produced food.

And in that moment, I realise that I have sworn mysef to well and truly starving to death.

Unless I stock up on my favourite Champion Smokies from Hartlief and forget sushi altogether. I buy all my salad greens from the Green Market every Saturday morning or I look out for produce from local farmers like Bellissima and Greenspot Organics at shops like Fruit Veg.

If it was winter and I didn’t have a keen eye on my own ass, I could get my pasta from Pasta Polana. But instead I’ll just stick to my high protein, low carb catastrophe and get my meat products from local butchers, my milk from Nammilk, my coffee from Slowtown and … err … and … err…

OK, so maybe I’ll be losing a little weight.

But if you wish more for me than malnutrition, please send me an email or a tweet recommending locally produced food and drink that I can survive on this October. Everything I eat will be featured in a wrap article I write at the beginning of November to advise people on who is making, producing or serving it local and lekker.

What I mean is, if you’re local and you make moonshine, hit me up so I can survive this thing with some prohibition style blur around the edges.

Failing which…

Ocsober, anyone?